12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, May 3, 2024

The barely study-able dark energy that scientists believe to be behind the relentless expansion of the universe seems to be weakening. The team operating the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument believes they’ve made the first major breakthrough in dark energy study in 25 years, which seems to suggest that dark energy is “evolving.”

Instead of paying for rent like a chump, 17-year-old Lasse Stolley has been paying for long train rides across Europe, maintaining his job as a software developer on the tracks.

Airbnb announced a new portion of their booking interface that they’re calling “Icons,” which features big expensive stunt houses. So far they’re working on the house from Up (which will be suspended from a crane), Prince’s house from Purple Rain and the mansion from the OG X-Men cartoon.

One of Garfield’s favorite hobbies was mailing Nermal off to Abu Dhabi. A Utah house cat climbed into a box full of Amazon returns, baffling and devastating its family for seven days. It finally appeared at an animal shelter in California.

An adult male orangutan was seen harvesting and chewing a particular medicinal plant used by humans in the area to treat pain and inflammation. He chewed it into a paste, spread it over a wound on his cheek and held it like a bandage, just like a human would.

Disney proudly announced that Epcot will hold a special exhibition of portraits drawn by renowned warmonger George W. Bush, called Portraits of Courage: A Commander’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.

Winning times at the Kentucky Derby have remained about the same, and in fact have gotten slightly slower since the 1960s. Experts think we’ve tapped all the performance improvement potential possible from meticulous breeding. But we think you can still shave off a few seconds if you put a horse in one of those crazy aerodynamic swimsuits that aren’t allowed at the Olympics anymore.

In its third attempt to wriggle out of multiple lawsuits accusing their baby powder of causing ovarian cancer, Johnson & Johnson is offering to pay $6.5 billion to settle “all pending and future U.S. lawsuits.”

Wordle made the New York Times millions of dollars last year, after being played over four billion times. That acquisition seems to have broken the dam, as Hearst recently acquired an indie puzzle game creator, and LinkedIn just launched three original games.

Neuroscientists conducted a brain imaging study that seems to have pinpointed a circuit of neural pathways across five regions of the brain that appears to play a crucial role in the elusive state of consciousness.

A charcoal painting of one-time baby Ann Turner Cook won the first Gerber baby contest in 1928, and is coming up on 100 years of being the company’s mascot and logo. But Gerber also holds a contest every year to select a new “spokesbaby,” who gets $25,000 for their trouble.

A Pennsylvania man took a trip to Georgia with his emotional support pet, Wally the alligator, but believes it was captured by a trapper and released into a swamp with around 20 other gators. He’s trying to figure out how to find and recapture Wally.